Technological advances in computer hardware, software and networking have lead to efficient, cost effective computing systems (e.g., desktop computers, laptops, handhelds, cellular telephones, servers, . . . ) that can communicate with each other from essentially anywhere in the world in order to exchange information. These systems continue to evolve into more reliable, robust and user-friendly systems. Advances have enabled these computing systems to be employed to access, browse and search the Internet, compose, send and receive email messages, view and edit documents, transmit and obtain text messages and/or instant messages, as well as perform numerous other actions. For instance, a user can employ a cellular telephone and/or a personal digital assistant (PDA) to search the Internet for movie times and invite a friend to a particular showing by sending an email, text message, or instant message.
As these systems continue to develop, various techniques have been employed in connection with inputting information. Some of the first computing systems received input by utilizing punch cards and paper tape. More recently, improvements have enabled providing information to such devices by using a keyboard, a mouse, a touch sensitive screen, a pen device, optical character recognition, speech recognition, and the like. For example, conventional systems oftentimes employ keyboards, which can vary in size depending upon the type of device. Pursuant to an illustration, a personal computer or laptop computer can employ a keyboard based on a QWERTY layout where each alphanumeric character can be associated with a respective key, while a cellular telephone can include fewer keys such that a number of alphabetic characters share a single key with a numeric character. For instance, a “2” key on a cellular telephone keypad is commonly associated with the letters “A”, “B”, and “C”.
Currently, a number of techniques can be utilized to input text with a limited keyboard, where ambiguity can exist due to more than one alphanumeric character being associated with a particular key. For instance, a multiple-tap approach can be employed such that a user presses a numeric key a number of times to enter a desired letter or number. By way of illustration, the “2” key can be pressed once to input the number 2, twice to input the letter A, three times to input the letter B, and four times to input the letter C. A pause and/or pressing a key that moves a cursor such as an arrow key can help differentiate between distinct alphanumeric characters. Such a technique, however, is commonly time consuming and inefficient for a user since a single key may be pressed a number of times to enter a single alphanumeric character.
Another common approach to enter text with numeric keys is a single-tap approach, where the user presses the numeric key associated with a desired letter once. Thereafter, the inputted characters are disambiguated, for example, by matching a sequence of characters corresponding with a word to a sequence stored in memory. By way of illustration, to enter the word “cell” a user could press the sequence 2-3-5-5, which can be compared to stored sequences in memory. Even though the single-tap approach offers a more efficient manner in which to enter text, it is associated with a number of drawbacks. In particular, the input for the single-tap approach can remain ambiguous; thus, additional user input is commonly required to resolve such ambiguity. According to the above illustration, the input sequence 2-3-5-5 can match the sequence associated with the word “cell” as noted as well as the key sequence related to the word “bell”. Hence, additional input is commonly needed to differentiate between such ambiguous possibilities.
Thus, conventional systems lacking a full keyboard are oftentimes associated with inefficient and time-consuming techniques to input data. In addition to the above noted difficulties associated with limited keyboards, devices such as PDAs commonly utilize a form of handwriting with which data input can be inefficient and/or slow. Moreover, even when a keyboard is available, a user may be a poor speller and/or may not be familiar with appropriate and/or popular inputs.